Marie-Pierre Poirier
Director, Regional Office for West and Central Africa
© UNICEF WCARO/2018/Hahn
Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa Region
Full credit must be given.
Marie-Pierre Poirier is UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa. Based in Dakar, she provides leadership for 24 country offices across the region.
Ms. Poirer's career with UNICEF spans more than 30 years across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America as an advocate for child rights. She has worked on the development and management of rights-based country programmes of cooperation in collaboration with governments, civil society and the private sector.
From 2012 to 2016, Ms. Poirier was UNICEF Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She has extensive field experience as UNICEF Representative to Brazil, Mozambique, Namibia, and Deputy Representative to Pakistan.
In 1989, she led UNICEF Child Rights Section in Geneva, at the time of the final negotiations on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. She started her career with UNICEF in New York as an expert on poverty and exclusion in urban areas.
Ms. Poirier holds a Master of Arts from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations at Sorbonne Nouvelle. She graduated in Economics from the University of Paris in 1981, after having studied a year in Harvard. She is the mother of Stefanie and Luc.
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